


One Day

by Prix



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Conversations, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, Gen, Scene tag, Team Bonding, Team Formation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21546679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prix/pseuds/Prix
Summary: Martha decides that joining Torchwood Three is inevitable.[Canon-divergent scene tag from the end ofJourney's End.]
Relationships: Jack Harkness & Martha Jones, Jack Harkness & Martha Jones & Mickey Smith, Martha Jones/Thomas Milligan (mentioned)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23
Collections: Public Call - Doctor Who fic exchange 2019





	One Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [navaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/gifts).



> I'm still salty about the fact that Torchwood didn't get a happier send-off with Martha and Mickey restoring the team to five members. This fic is what I wish had happened, focused on Martha and her very reasonable concerns about it. 
> 
> This fic isn't really shippy, but it _could_ be read as pre-ship for either Martha/Jack or Martha/Mickey. I have my preferences, but they're irrelevant to the text basically, so let your heart lead the way. However, this is intended to focus on Martha and Jack's friendship and how I think that her influence could have really helped Jack in starting-again in Torchwood as the end of S2 suggested. I felt like Torchwood S2 was a lot less bleak than S1 in part because Jack had encountered the Doctor again and had found some peace with things, and S2 is tragic but isn't so hopeless. I really would just have liked to have a different follow-up to that, so this is me imagining the beginning of said follow-through on themes I feel were planted and wasted. 
> 
> I really hope that my recipient navaan and anyone else who reads this enjoy it! Please feel free to leave feedback.

  
  
  
  
  


When Jack takes her hand, Martha feels her heart skip a beat. The funny thing is, no matter how long she is away from him, it feels easy to be around him. She could roll her eyes at herself; she has become aware that she isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last to be taken in by his charms. 

She looks up at him as they walk along, hands taking up a steady pendulum’s pace between them. 

“You know, I’m not sure about UNIT these days,” he says amiably. “Maybe there’s something else you could be doing.” 

Martha finds herself blinking a few times against the breeze. 

“And what’s that?” she asks. She is a bit coy about it, but she knows what’s coming. 

She’d been there. At both their funerals. 

Torchwood is down a medical officer. 

As much as, in the moment, it feels like a casual, easy request, she can sense what is at stake with it. She nearly looks back around at the Doctor and the TARDIS one more time, just to remind herself why - no matter how much she wants to help people and no matter how much a part of her thrills when she is the final line of defense against _something_ \- there are only so many risks she can take. 

“Well,” Jack says, clearing his throat over the increased tension - the elephant in what he’s asking. “You know we’re… pretty short-staffed,” he finishes. He is trying to make it sound less terrible than it is, and it’s no easy task. He doesn’t let go of her hand. If anything, he grips it just a bit tighter. 

“I know, Jack,” she says quickly. She tugs his hand a little closer to her body. “But--” she says. 

She doesn’t get to finish that sentence. 

“Hey, you two!” calls a voice behind them. 

She turns as Jack does to see Mickey Smith chasing after them. She had learned little more than his name through all of this, so she doesn’t really know how to react. She smiles, because that seems like a reasonable choice. 

She wants today to be a day where they get to smile. 

With another glance at Jack as Mickey catches up to them, she wonders if it will be the last one for a while. 

“Ugh,” Jack complains, wry and loud. “Thought I got rid of you!” 

Mickey is coming right for their hands, and Martha feels herself let go. She wonders which of them did it first, but then Mickey wraps his arm around her shoulders just as easily as he wraps them around Jack’s. 

Curiosity stays her more serious concerns for a moment, and she laughs softly, not quite winded by the sudden, jarringly friendly contact. 

She cranes her neck a little to look over at Jack. 

“You two know each other, then?” 

“Just a bit,” Jack agrees. 

“Yeah, he was one of the blokes that stole my girlfriend,” Mickey remarks dryly. 

“... Oh, _right_ ,” Martha says, going for disarming, sarcastic, something. In the past, she may have had a ready remark about how _all_ of them seemed to be so wrapped up in Rose, but with time and distance and having met Rose, none seemed forthcoming. If anything, what was meant as a funny remark - she thinks - strikes her as just a bit sad. 

Finally, she glances back, but the TARDIS has faded away in the distance. She wonders what he’ll do now that he found her, but she trains her gaze back at the pavement in front of her feet. She can’t imagine anything healthy, knowing him. 

“It’s okay,” Mickey says, fingers gently tapping against where they rest over her arm. “We were just kids anyway,” he explains. 

“More to the point, what are you doing… here… instead of back on the TARDIS?” Jack asks. 

“That’s easy. Coming with you,” Mickey replies. 

Martha can feel Jack glancing over and regarding him, then he looks at her again and she meets his eyes. 

“Jack,” she warns softly, asking him not to. 

Jack presses on anyway. 

“Say, Mickey, you’re pretty good with computers, right?” he asks. And there it is. 

* * * 

Somehow, listening to Jack convince Mickey draws her in more quickly than anything Jack could have said to her directly. About an hour later, they are in a coffee shop, and she isn’t sure why she hasn’t excused herself to _go home_. She sits there, tapping a sugar packet round and round like an hourglass. 

Mickey readily shares his resumé of having already worked for Torchwood on the parallel Earth. She finds herself cataloguing it more out of a sense of obligation than interest. Outside, the typical, cloudy day is still soft. There are children playing outside, families, and couples walking hand-in-hand. 

“Jack,” she finally interrupts, sighing and glancing apologetically at Mickey. “When are you going to tell him that Torchwood on this planet is down to bare-bones operation with something like a forty-percent mortality rate?” she snaps. 

“Wh- _forty_?” Mickey asks, sitting back and raising his eyebrows as he looks at Jack, staggered. 

Jack gives Martha a look that is a bit wilting but she sees the haze of guilt dampen its bite. She hates it for him, but at the same time she recognizes it as, at the very least, an appropriate response. 

“Look, I know… I know what happened was… bad. And I know that the organisation doesn’t have the best track record this century, _but_ —” 

“But _what_ , Jack?” Martha complains at him, grasping her paper coffee cup on either side and feeling the warmth seep into her hands. It is like an anchor as she thinks about the last time she had seen Owen and Toshiko _before_ someone had needed to scatter their ashes or inter them into the ground. 

“What do you want me to do?” Jack asks, raising his voice just enough to gain a startled glance from a few of the coffee shop’s patrons. The three of them glance around, all noticing the unwanted attention. Jack clears his throat and bows his head down, reining in his voice. 

Martha tilts her head at him, looking at him with both frustration and pity. 

“I want you to be honest about what you can _do_ at the Hub anymore. Maybe it’s not me who needs to be thinking about getting a different job,” she suggests as gently as she possibly can. 

Jack eyes the pocket that he knows she had slid the Osterhagen Key into. He nods toward it. 

“You told him you’d get rid of it,” he says simply. 

“And I will, but—” 

“But what,” Jack says, less a question and more of an echo. An indictment. 

And she hates that she actually feels it. She glances out the coffee shop window again. Children playing, the Earth back in its proper orbit, and she has in her pocket the power to tear the whole thing apart from the inside. She looks down and gives a sort of nod that is a nonverbal _touché_. 

“This is why I need you,” Jack says. She finds herself forcing herself to take it as a _’both of you,’_ , but then he pointedly requests her attention. “Martha.” 

She looks back up at his eyes and sighs heavily. 

“You know why I couldn’t keep traveling with the Doctor. You know - better than I do, in fact - what traveling with him did to my _family_ ,” she says. She keeps her voice low, because in spite of the fact that she is wearing a very specific kind of business attire, she really shouldn’t be talking about certain aspects of her job in public. 

“Yeah, I do,” Jack says. 

Martha is vaguely aware of Mickey watching this conversation unfold like a tennis match. 

“And you’re operating a suicide cult in comparison,” she hisses back, very low because she knows it’s a cruel thing to say. 

Jack doesn’t flinch away from it. 

“Again, that’s why I need you,” he says softly. He exhales, visibly trying to release some tension from his body as he leans back a bit against his chair. He glances down at his hands, thumb inspecting a callous he may not like the feel of. “After Torchwood One fell,” he says, discreet and controlled, “I… was trying to put back together a surgical force. Not… surgical as-in—” 

“I know what you mean,” Martha assures him. She glances over at Mickey who nods vague consent at continuing to listen to his conversation. She settles and leans against her elbows a bit toward Jack on the table, making their discretion easier to maintain. 

“I thought the bureaucracy was what got in the way,” Jack says. He nods toward her. “UNIT, for example…” 

“I know. I know,” she says. She had heard the same objection from the Doctor before, and she supposes he has more authority on what UNIT ought to be than Jack does, at any rate. She rolls her shoulders back, finding herself actually thinking about something that could ruin the life she has put together, even while trying to help people here. 

Ruin it, but she’d been thinking of ending the lives of every human presently on Earth if that was what it took to save them from something even worse. 

She presses her lips into a tight line. 

“If we do this,” she finds herself saying. 

“We?” Mickey asks. 

She looks over at him with a smirk. 

“Well, yes. I’m only having this conversation because he’s got his hooks into you.” 

Mickey lifts his hands in a gesture of holding Jack at bay. 

“No hooks here,” he says. 

“Right,” Martha says in a noncommittal tone. “But you followed him. Not me. You don’t know me. And five has a better chance of success than four.” 

“So you’re pinning this on me,” Mickey says. 

“A little bit, but never mind,” Martha says, turning her attention back to Jack. “If we do this, you’re going to have to be open-minded. You’re going to have to _listen_. Because I know that since you’ve been around the block a few more times than the rest of us, you sometimes think that you know better. But just like him, sometimes you’re not thinking like a person with one life to make the best of.” 

“I know,” Jack repeats. “But seeing the Doctor again - the first time, I mean. Meeting you. That made me… better. And it made my team better. And I know… what happened to Owen and Tosh isn’t… excusable or reassuring, but I think… the world still needs this. What we can do with it. And I’d like it if you’d help me… help us be what the world needs when _he_ isn’t around.” 

Martha takes a few deep breaths, thinking it over. She takes a sip from the warm cup in front of her. She pops off its lid and stirs the foam inside with a little wooden stick. 

“So you want me to quit my job,” she says, trying to make something heavy seem a bit lighter. 

“I’m just asking for a peaceful transfer,” Jack replies, playing along. 

“I’m just saying, if this doesn’t work out, you’re paying for my honeymoon,” she says. 

* * * 

Martha arrives home to lights on. Instead of going back to her apartment, she has gone to check in on her mother who is waiting. She feels the way she trembles when she hugs her tight. She is such a strong woman, but there was some things that should shake anyone to their core. She wonders if there’s something wrong with her, that it doesn’t anymore. 

She hopes that she isn’t making a choice that’s going to break her mother’s heart. 

A little while later, she excuses herself to the guest room that is the first pick of any of the kids when they’ve come home on their own. Leo usually gets it, but Leo isn’t there. She finds some civilian clothes and unpacks the pockets of her tactical outfit. One thing she draws out of a pocket is unlike the others. It makes a soft clinking sound, like a tiny bell ringing, as she drops it into a porcelain dish on the dresser. 

She goes to take a shower, mind alternating between racing and allowing itself to be lulled into almost complete silence by the pattering of the water against the wall where it rushes past her. 

Jack’s eyes keep looking at her when she closes her own. 

_’That’s why I need you.’_

_I need you._

She steps out of the shower when her hair has finally been taken down and rinsed clean. She towels herself off and pulls on her underwear and the clothes she’d decided would make do for sleeping at home. She just wants to go to sleep. She knows what she’s going to do in the days to come, and she doesn’t want to think about it too much more right now. 

She just wants to _sleep_. 

She walks back into the guest room, back to the dresser, and stares down at the beautiful, glinting thing in the porcelain dish. It had cost Tom a pretty penny, she knew. It was an ethically sourced diamond, and it was bigger than she actually needed, and it looked perfect. Sitting there in the dish. He wasn’t there to see it on her finger that often, though. He was away in Africa, and she knew that she would need to find a way to get word to him somehow, in the morning. 

Tell him she was, apparently, quitting her job. 

She pushes the ring back onto her left ring finger for a moment. She looks down at it and at herself in the mirror. Then she slides it off again, leaving it safe and sound in the dish, to crawl into bed and go to sleep. 

She feels that she never will for a bit, body thrumming with adrenaline and mind screaming at her even when she starts to doze. The second she enters REM-sleep, she is seeing memories, disjointed, rather than dreams. But soon enough her body gives way into a deeper state of unconsciousness, and for a moment she can stop wondering about how exactly joining Torchwood and leaving behind nice, protective and merciless bureaucracy will change her life.


End file.
